


Red, Red, Red

by peppermintchild



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-12
Updated: 2015-11-13
Packaged: 2018-05-01 07:26:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5197388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peppermintchild/pseuds/peppermintchild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha Romanoff sits in a cell in a prison filled with remarkable people. She will escape, but not yet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is an old fic (like, 2012 old), but one I keep coming back to every six months or so. I've never been able to properly realise the ending, so I hope posting it and getting an audience for it - have feedback, constructive criticism, whatever? hit me up! - might help the muses.
> 
> So let me know what you think!

One of the first things you learn in captivity is that breaking your body and breaking your mind are two completely different things. They are, of course, inextricably linked, but one does not guarantee the other. This was a lesson taught when you were a girl, when your name was Natalia and you learnt that pain was something not to be feared but to be used as a source of strength.

You have sat in many cells, been held prisoner by many people, but few have ever truly caught you – most times you allow yourself to be locked away to further your plans. This is one such instance of the former; you were caught fairly – that is to say, hit with something when out jogging – and now you sit in a small white room with iron bars fencing you into an even smaller section. You woke up here five days ago, you will escape, but not yet

There are six cells in your block – two rows of three – and you are in a centre cell which makes you uneasy. Of the six of you, two have broken bodies, two have broken minds, and two have not yet been taken for their turn at interrogation; you are one of the latter.

The occupant of cell number one has a broken ankle that is swelling and colouring and stinking at an alarming rate. The woman the ankle belongs to, a tanned older lady with sharp teeth and a sharper mind tells you that if she doesn’t get it checked out in the next three or so days she’s going to have to amputate it herself to prevent infection climbing her leg. When you ask her what she plans to use in lieu of a bone saw she smiles and her teeth grow longer and sharper until she almost looks more animal than human. But beast or woman, the occupant of cell number one is a soldier in a war she didn’t know she was fighting and by God as her witness she will fight her way out of this place or find a way to take their captors with her in painful death.

Cell number two hosts what appears to be a girl of no more than seven with wide eyes and a desire for nothing more than to see her mother again. You don’t know what it is, but three minutes ago it was a balding man with mustard on his tie and a habit of click-clacking his teeth while complaining about being late for a meeting, an hour before than an indigo skinned creature that looked human in shape except for the distinct lack of genitals or ears. Whatever its appearance three things remain the same: first, that it speaks with a gentle metre and the rhyme scheme of a sonnet; second, that it cannot touch the bars without being burnt by them; and thirdly, its arms have clearly been ripped off at some point, the wounds cauterised and making the cell block smell faintly of burnt flesh. It does not seem to be bothered by this at all.

The third cell looks empty, but only because the man inside of it has had his mind violated so many times his wish to be invisible has been granted. He can do anything he wants, so long as it is something he desires to the exclusion of all else. He could have won the war in a heartbeat had he been shown the atrocities on a screen, make him believe beyond a doubt if only for a second that the world would be better without it, but their captors got to him first and gave him a more first-hand introduction to the horrors of war. For the past five hours he has done nothing but cry and scream and soil himself on the floor. You will put a bullet in his head the first chance you get, there is only one type of mercy in wars and that is mercy killings. His own pain aside, if he unscrambled his thoughts for minute he could blink them all out of existence and you can’t let that kind of risk go unchecked.

Cell four is on your left, and contains a young woman staring unseeing at the wall. You don’t know what she could do, or if she was still able to do it now. Probably not. If she cannot run with you then she will meet a bullet through the skull the same as your invisible man. You’ve heard the phrase ‘leave no soul behind’ used in regards to prioritising the release of all prisoners and not just yourself, the camaraderie of teams or simply human empathy. With your gun you will send her soul on to the afterlife, or to whatever comes next after this plane of existence can no longer hold you. Her soul will not be left behind, but her body will.

The fifth cell holds you, a little bruised and chafed but no more or less mentally stable than before you were caught and dragged here. You will escape at some point, of this there is no doubt, you are only unsure of when. You rather hope the chance comes before the woman in cell one performs an amputation with her teeth.

The sixth cell is to your right and contains a man you have tried and failed to kill many times. He has been mostly unconscious since he was brought here two days ago, a ‘healing trance’ he called it. His cell appears to sap the magic from him somehow, leaving him weak and irritable. He hopes, as he explained to you the first night he was here, that if he slows his heart-rate and breathing down low enough he might be able to build up a more primitive type of magic that will allow him to quickly cast a single spell with enough force to break him out of the cell. Once out, his normal magic should return to him and he can escape and be free to slaughter the people who dared to restrain a god. You do not ask him if he will escape alone or with his fellow prisoners, it does not matter what is answer would be; he is a liar and always has been. You might have played him once, but he is a Trickster by name and nature and he will not underestimate you again.  


	2. Chapter 2

“Look,” you say, “I’m not exactly pleased about this, but if either of us want to get out we’re going to have to pool our information – find a way to work together.”

Camaraderie is familiar to you and you could spin a tale of it with your eyes closed. When you were a child your peers were your comrades, as were the men and women who taught you how to fight. It’s not something you have much cause to show these days, but you know how to put personal feelings aside and put your life into the hands of someone who wants you dead and trust them not to do it. You also know how to pretend.

                “Oh, because _of course_ I can trust you,” he says with a smile. The trance was abandoned shortly after the woman in cell one was dragged away. “No, that’s not what bothers me – you’re a professional, I respect that, and you’re _very_ good to have tricked me.”

He smiles again, and you feel the urge to cover yourself.

                “My issue with this,” he continues, “is that I don’t know who _they_ are.”

Loki crawls slowly over to the space where your bars join and whispers, “I know why we’re here – I because our lady captor knows that I could stop her, and you because she knows that you’ve bested me before. Thor and the rest of your merry gang have neither the information I possess nor the talents you do to be a worthy enough threat for her to neutralise this early in the game; but what of the others in this cell block? What do they have that makes them dangerous to the _witch_?”

Loki knows who has them, of course he does, but he’s not saying. You run through several hazy thoughts on how to get him to reveal it, but he knows your tricks now and you’re meant to be allies for the moment.

                “What was her name? I didn’t catch it when she took me, and sadly we’ve not been blessed with a personal introduction.”

He stares for a long time, surveying every inch of you before deeming the knowledge safe to give. Loki would be a remarkable ally. Stark and Rogers believe him to be a lost cause, but you and Clint know better – people can do terrible things beyond imagining, things from which there is now way to make amends or to clean from your soul, but all it takes is one person’s mercy at just the right moment to make them want to try.

Thor says that Loki is a lot like Stark, but you see more of yourself in him.

-

Stark built weapons and killed people through ignorance, you _are_ a weapon and what you did you did with full understanding of the consequences – for them and for you. It’s much harder to drag yourself up from that, because deep down you still believe that some of the things you did were right, and there are things that you would do again even now. Stark doesn’t have what it takes to put his hands around someone’s neck and kill them for the greater good, but you’ve seen a lot of things in your time and you know that people are small and often insignificant when it comes to the big picture. Clint thinks similarly, but he tries his best to be merciful to the little people; you’ve had too many little people grow up and try to stab you in the back to have this philosophy, but still, you try.

-

                “ _Amora_ ,” he spits, as though the name itself was unclean, “Amora the _Enchantress_ she calls herself. She’s right to, she is both a great beauty and a great practitioner of magic – unfortunately for us all she’s also greatly insane! I don’t know why she’s making me an enemy, we have so much in common, we could be wondrous together.”

                “Well,” you say dryly, “you certainly are pretty – but if you’re really that powerful why can’t you get out?”

He laughs, pleased. “Were we on Asgard, and were I still in favour as a prince that would be taken as a challenge to fight, Lady Widow. Insulting my prowess at defending myself _and_ insulting my manliness all in one go – you do like to live on the edge, don’t you?”

                “The stories say magic is for women and old men,” you tilt your head, as though you are considering him, “you don’t look old.”

                “Ah yes, but the stories also say that I birthed Odin’s steed and that I am his blood-brother, rather than a babe he stole. Still, who’s to say that in another time that wasn’t true… the world is everlasting and ever-repeating after all and in that time anything is possible.”

You watch each other in silence for a short while. You’ve insulted him, but growing up on Asgard being unable to grow a beard would have done worse for his psyche than anything you could do for him here so you’re not overly worried.

It’s easy to see how he went so wrong, once you’ve done a little research. Thor will cry openly and unashamed at a movie, but to suggest the action is feminine is both alien and insulting to him despite the crash-course introduction to humanity and feminism that is dating Jane Foster. Expressing your emotions like Thor and Loki do is acceptable and within the Asgardian norm, but Loki’s magic and use of ranged weapons is both unmanly and cowardly in their society. Always being the unfavoured child can be devastating to humans, but it’s rarely cause for an attempt at world domination. Then again, he isn’t human.

Thor is uncharacteristically silent on what it was that made Loki finally snap, he is loyal to a fault and although he understands that Loki will never be the brother he once was, Thor hopes. He respects the centuries they had together, and he pulls his punches because of it. There’s pieces of the puzzle missing, and it’s fair to assume that you will never know the whole story (though it likely has to do with his adoption), but it won’t stop you from trying. That is for later, now your focus is on Amora.

                “So how do you know her, this Amora?”

                “Ah, ah, ah!” He chastises you with a grin, “No, we shan’t speak of her any more until the rest of them are gone or dead. No, you tell me a story Miss Romanoff – it’s only fair, seeing as you can read mine from your books.”

                “You said those stories weren’t true.”

                “They’re not,” he confirms, “but neither do yours have to be, I wouldn’t know the difference.”

                “You already heard my stories from Agent Barton,” Clint told you what information he passed on, it wasn’t everything but it was enough. It was the bad things, the things you want to keep hidden, that you gave to Clint as a gesture of what he means to you because although, yes, you love and you love deeply, the people you say the words to tend to die because of it. So you gave him a list of names and places instead, a list of things you can’t ever take back.

                “Well, I’m not much a fan of horror stories these days – you certainly were a thing to be feared weren’t you?” There’s something lying unsaid on the tip of his tongue, you can see it. “No, give me a story about _life_. What was your life like between the blood-stained days and nights?”

You stay silent, he pouts and rolls his eyes dramatically.

                “ _Fine_ , then,” he says, “we’ll trade stories – but you go first.”

                “How do I know you’ll tell the truth?”

                “I probably won’t, not the whole truth in any case. But as I said, you are under no obligation to speak the truth either. Your Agent Barton only told me the truth as he knows it, if you can fool me you could most certainly have fooled him with half-truths and lies plenty.”

-

You tell him about being born in the 1920’s and forging your own destiny over the decades, and then you tell him about being born in the 1980’s with a legacy-name and making it your own. True to his word he doesn’t point out the contradictions in your stories, and in kind you don’t point out the conflicts in his either.

He tells you about his younger brothers, Baldr and Höðr, and later talks of his regret at having only Thor for a sibling – for the royal family was very protective of their two sons, and during those long years of his childhood he would have liked someone else to talk to. 

You talk about your love of dancing, and of knitting, and of books in your native language; he talks of long hours poring over forgotten tomes, of learning knife fighting from his mother and never once being able to beat her, and of giving birth to an eight-legged horse. He tells the last one as though he were a bard in an alehouse, with obvious glee and great exaggeration – you’re so tired you can’t help but give a real, honest laugh and when you do there’s a glint in his eye that says he notices and you can’t shake the feeling that he’s won something from you.

 The man in cell number two soliloquises quietly about missing his wife and Loki rolls his eyes.


End file.
